"The Cheerful Cricket and Others is a collection of stories about how different insects and animals learn meaningful life lessons. There are little songs at the end of each story that children and adults can play and sing together."

I'm not sure I can decide if any of the few 'Jeannette Marks' online - possibly a suffragette, proud lesbian, poet, dramatist and/or english professor - are in fact the author of this book. Probably not.

Edith Brown, on the other hand, was a founding member of a group of young women known as the Saturday Evening Girls, who began meeting at the Boston Library in the late 19th century and later established Paul Revere Pottery.

"[The group was] part of a social and cultural endeavor that began in the Boston Public Library in the 1890s. They were the result of the convergence of three major movements influencing Boston at the time: the growth of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the evolving role of women and Women's Movement, and the Settlement House Movement."

See: one, two, three. (None of this has anything to do with the Cricket book at all of course.)

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You mention arts & crafts in Boston: the Museum of Fine Arts hosted an exhibition of works by the "Saturday Evening Girls" pottery club in 2006. Most of the pottery was from the Museum's collection, so it may be able to be seen by searching their website at www.mfa.org. Very nice piece. Thanks.

Yep, that's me! It is sweet -- it used to be played a lot as a filler in the ABC's after school program, a long time ago. It's from some rock opera or something I think. But I was looking for a hi-res version and didn't notice that the link I posted doesn't have the original music. This one is better.

I must agree with Jarac Rogovima that the lovely illustrations seem to be accompanied by a startling amount of death, rendered even more disturbing by the non-sequential arrangement (first Toadie Todson is dead, then he/she/it is sitting there in boots, perhaps as some sort of revenant). But I suspect they were arranged that way on purpose.